Information technology abroad: Europe’s first national e-program for crowdsourced archive digitization

The National Library of Finland has announced it had launched a national e-program for the digitization of Finland's historical documents and material. The first of its kind in Europe, the e-program Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers) harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to mobilize people to help digitize millions of pages of archive material.

The e-program technology provider is Microtask, whose automated platform splits dull repetitive tasks into tiny microtasks and distributes them over the internet. Once carried out by interested microworkers around Finland or around the world, Microtask puts the results back together into a completed assignment.

 In the first phase, The National Library of Finland's e-program consists of two online games. In ‘Mole Hunt' (Myyräjahti), the player is shown two different words, and they must determine as quickly as possible if they are the same. This uncovers erroneous words in archived material. In ‘Mole Bridge' (Myyräsilta), players have to spell correctly the words appearing on the screen. Correct answers help badgers build a bridge across a river. Teachers can use our e-program for teaching purposes or school projects.

In the next phase, the Digitalkoot e-program will be expanded to target also more serious history buffs.

“We have millions and millions of pages of historically and culturally valuable magazines, newspapers and journals online. The challenge is that the optical character recognition often contains errors and omissions, which hamper for example searches,” says Kai Ekholm, Director of the National Library of Finland. “Manual correction is needed to weed out these mistakes so that the texts become machine readable, enabling scholars and archivists to search the material for the information they need.”

To date, four million pages of different types of texts from the 18th to 20th centuries have been digitized, but there still remain huge bulks of cultural heritage archived only in paper files. The e-program enables anyone to contribute converting portions of Finnish cultural heritage into a lasting format. The aim is to crowdsource thousands of volunteers to participate online utilizing modern technology developed in Finland.